Three weeks after a stock market debut that ended flat, Mynt has handed investors the number they were told to wait for. The parent of GCash, the Philippines’s dominant e-wallet, said its third-quarter revenue hit ₱24.0 billion (about US$400 million), up 16.6 per cent year-on-year and the highest in its history.
The timing matters. When Mynt listed on 20 October after raising ₱60.9 billion (roughly US$1 billion) in the largest IPO in Philippine history, local brokers advised would-be buyers to hold off until the Q3 numbers landed. Their worry was simple: the hype was loud, and Mynt’s second quarter had slipped from the first. The stock, priced at ₱6.60, a hefty 34 per cent below its ₱10 ceiling, closed its first trading week at ₱6.27.
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On paper, the quarter answers that worry. Nine-month revenue rose 12.2 per cent to ₱67.1 billion (about US$1.1 billion), quicker than the 9.8 per cent growth posted at the half-year mark. Net income for the period climbed 17.4 per cent to ₱16.5 billion (about US$275 million), up from 7.3 per cent growth in the first half. Net margin stood at a healthy 24.5 per cent.
The loan book is outrunning the user base
The more revealing numbers sit further down the release. Monthly active users rose 9.7 per cent to 42.1 million, which is respectable but hardly explosive for an app that is already the country’s default wallet. Daily transactions averaged 64.4 million over nine months, up 16 per cent, so existing users are doing more rather than new ones flooding in.
Payments gross transaction value, the total money flowing through the app, grew 23.1 per cent to ₱15.1 trillion (about US$252 billion). The standout, though, is credit. GCash’s loan portfolio swelled 43.3 per cent to ₱79.3 billion (about US$1.3 billion), growing more than four times faster than its user base. Active borrowers reached 7.8 million, roughly one in every five monthly users.
That arithmetic tells you what Mynt is turning into. Payments win the users; lending makes the money. It is the same quiet pivot Grab’s own third-quarter numbers laid bare last week, and part of a wider regional shift in which fintech, having solved distribution, now has to scale on the balance sheet.
The non-performing loan (NPL) ratio, the share of loans where borrowers have stopped paying, held at 4.8 per cent, flat on the previous quarter. Mynt calls that sustained asset quality. A more cautious reading is that it is stable, not low. Nearly one in every 20 pesos lent has gone bad, a sign that GCash is lending to customers traditional banks often skip. That is both the social mission and the risk. The average loan works out to roughly ₱10,200 (about US$170): small-ticket, high-frequency credit that can sour quickly when household budgets tighten.
What the press release does not say
Two caveats deserve attention. First, the release claims record quarterly net income but discloses profit only on a nine-month basis. Investors therefore cannot cleanly set Q3 profit against Q2, the very comparison analysts flagged before listing.
Second, the cost line is flattered. Mynt says operating expenses grew in line with revenue, but most one-off IPO costs will be booked in the fourth quarter, alongside what it calls seasonally higher costs. Q4, in other words, is where the margin story gets its real test.
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The macro backdrop is not friendly either. The peso hit a record low in October and the Philippine Stock Exchange index sank to an 11-month low, with foreign investors pulling about US$623 million out of local shares this year.
Chief Financial Officer Evelyn Ng nonetheless struck a confident note, arguing that GCash has shown “there is good business in doing good” and that sizeable room remains to grow in both payments and lending.
A crowded fight for Filipino borrowers
GCash is not lending into an empty field. Maya, the PLDT-backed fintech under Voyager Innovations, runs its own wallet and digital bank. Specialist lenders are pushing in too: Salmon is betting US$140 million on secured lending, while Grab’s US$1.49 billion Atome deal brings a regional buy-now-pay-later player with Philippine ambitions under a superapp roof.
GCash’s edge is distribution: 42 million monthly users and a stream of transaction data no bank can match, built on regulatory foundations that, as one e27 contributor argued, are what let Philippine fintech scale this fast. Its weakness is concentration. Unlike Grab or Sea, every one of Mynt’s pesos is earned in a single market, exposed to a single currency and a single central bank.
April’s lock-up is the next exam
For the Philippine Stock Exchange, which has struggled to win tech listings in a year when Malaysia carried Southeast Asia’s IPO market, these numbers are welcome relief. More than 140,000 GCash users, many of them first-time investors, bought into the IPO through the app’s own trading platform. Their money now rides on the same loan book the company is racing to grow.
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The quarter proves Mynt can grow profit faster than revenue even as user growth cools. It does not yet prove the bad-loan line can stay flat while the loan book expands by more than 40 per cent a year. The fourth-quarter results, and the expiry of the 180-day lock-up on pre-IPO shareholders in April, will show whether the market believes it can.
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